Chablis: History & Recommendations for the Great Burgundy White Wine

About 110 miles southeast of Paris, at the northern tip of the Burgundy wine region France lays Chablis.  Chablis is the name of a village that has given its name to a region producing some of the best white wines in the world.  The region of Chablis encompasses 19 towns and is about twenty by fifteen kilometers in size.  In France, by law, wines are named after the place where they are fashioned and not the grape varietal.  The wine producers of Chablis have spent hundreds of years determining which grapes produce the best wines for their soils and the answer:  crisp, mineral-driven wines made from the Chardonnay grape. 

It was the Romans who first started planting vines in the area.  By the Dark ages, the wines were being cultivated by the local monasteries.  As early as 865AD the monks of Saint-Martin-de-Tours were making Chablis on the slopes of the Serein River which dissects the town.  The wines were being sold in the town of Auxerre and destined for the markets of Paris.  Records dating back to the mid-1400’s show Chablis wines being shipped to England and Belgium.  Unfortunately, the town of Chablis was destroyed in 1568 by the Huguenots.  Before the wine industry could recover, the town endured the French Revolution and invasions from Prussia.  As the vineyards began to recover, Phyloxera found its way there destroying them.  After replanting, production of wine increased to 160,000 cases in the 1930’s.  Of course, World War II took its toll, but the vineyards soon recovered.  By the 1970’s and 1980’s there was a worldwide boom and the demand for Chablis soared. 

Most people agree that what makes Chablis special is what the French call terroir.  The soils are famous for Kimmeridgian clay and chalk.  Millions of years ago this area was an ocean floor and the area has many sea fossils.  Over the eons, this developed in a mineral rich soil which makes for distinctive chardonnays.  Perhaps that is the reason many people believe good crisp Chablis and oysters to be a magical food and wine pairing. 

The climate and characteristics of Chablis more closely resemble the region of Champagne which is only thirty miles away than the center of Burgundy, the village of Beaune, that  lies 100 miles to the south.  Despite the success of wine makers here, however, this is a difficult region to make wine.  It is one of the most northern regions that successfully make table wines.  The summer days are long but temperature can be an issue.  There is a constant exposure to frost for the vines.  There have been many years where the entire crop has been destroyed.  People still talk about the late frosts of 1957 and 1961 which left many vineyards destroyed.  Modern (and less modern) techniques of windmills, sprinklers and heaters have helped the growers in more recent years. 

In 1938, the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC), the governmental agency in charge of vineyard classification and other wine related issues, released the primary classification of Chablis vineyards.  Petit Chablis vineyards (theoretically lesser quality vineyards), was classified in 1944.  Regrettably, with the boom of the 70’s and 80’s the governmental agency in charge of classifying vineyards relaxed its rules and allowed some of the previously abandoned vineyards to be labeled as Chablis.  In addition, some land was promoted (unjustifiably?) to a higher classification.